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the French Quarter is a mixture of passions and loves and such and such.

But the quarter is what you want.

The quarter to be you know, old, dank, sort of funky kind of place that was full of soul and, you know, just a nice place to see interesting things that's the kind of things I remember about the quarter as a young guy.

It was a place where you could live the good life, really a very pleasant, easy life.

It was just a place where people who wanted to do things right, we paid scum came because the rent was so cheap.

And to do he had Alphonso and I and his car shows and my users and the way you went there was Italians you'd walk in Bourbon Street and you'd say, those showgirls at that time, they would dress in high heels, furs, gorgeous evening gowns, or cocktail dresses.

It was a glamorous street the French Quarter is so many things, a neighborhood, a tourist attraction, a source of inspiration for artists, then writers a location for dining or just browsing.

I'm Peggy Scott Laborde, and in the next hour, we'll recall some of the personalities and places that are part of the more recent history of the French Quarter.

That was New Orleans was founded by French settlers in 1718 throughout its history.

The city and the Louisiana territory was under the control of the French, then the Spanish back to the French and ultimately purchased by the United States in 1803.

The original settlement evolved into what is today called the French Quarter.

With such a diverse heritage in such a colorful history, the quarter has always had its own special character.

The quarter always gave you the feeling that you were in Shanghai or someplace far away and you had a lot more license than the most famous street in the quarter is Bourbon Street.

Early in his career, clarinetist Pete Fadden played in many clubs on the Neon Strip you had a comedian, a comedian, a mediation.

And and then after that you had the either the cat girl coming out or some big names and stripper.

It was fun to be a 17 year old kid playing for a strip show.

He was back here in Asia making a difference if you could play.

I don't think they had an age limit on the street at that time.

For visitors it has become associated with the exotic and it is where locals got their first view of a forbidden world.

We used to deliver to some places this grocery on Bourbon Street and what it meant to me was that I was going to get to see something I never saw before.

And when my dad made the deliveries after work, I'd be in his old 56 point and he'd have a couple of cases of cheese or something in the trunk.

And I'd stay in the car.

But I was pretty attentive.

I was looking all around.

I remember the first time I went in to a strip bar it was that place, and I don't even know if it's still there, but they swing on a swing and their legs come through the through the window.

And I guess I was late high school by then.

I'd never seen I'd done anything like that at the time.

That was pretty neat to me.

It was everything you couldn't have.

It was everything that Catholic New Orleans told you you could not have.

And yet you saw all the people telling you you couldn't have it there.

They were all there, and and you wondered why.

And it didn't make sense, but it was, you know, forbidden fruit, you know, and the doors would swing open and you'd see the almost naked girls.

It was our inoculation, a vice, you know, till we eventually were vaccinated against it.

You never knew who you might run into in the strip joints for a Sidney Arroyo senior.

It was a childhood friend.

I knew her from grammar school, and that was one of my Italian Sacred Heart.

And we're in the same bed on.

And she came on.

I said, Oh, no, I said, I know it's you.

I said, I know it's not his sister.

And she burst out laughing and she was dancing.

And we talked afterwards and very nice person.

And she's now mother and half a dozen kids, I think Grammy winning singer and pianist Doctor John, whose real name is Mac Rebennack, played on Bourbon Street for strippers early in his career as sailors.

Most strippers couldn't dance too good they usually look good, but they couldn't dance to it.

But the one that was real usually got famous, good dancing and good ready frame.

You see, she was my back and one of the better ones because she had red, red hair and flaming red hair and she was hot from the late 1940s all the way to the early sixties.

Another popular dance around Bourbon Street was Kitty West, but she was better known by her stage name.

That would be Mystic Music in the back, like a clarinet and just the slow piano and all of a sudden the emcee would say, We take you on a mythical trip to the bayous of Louisiana, where deep in the Midwest, is Evangeline, the Oyster Bowl, and all of a sudden the drapes would open slowly and the shell was there and the shell would open slow, and all of a sudden you'd see a leg slowly moving up.

And then all of a sudden I would stand up and go into Swamp Girl and pick the pearl up and dance with the pearl and do a little Afro-Cuban and a bit of ballet with it.

And then that's when I would go into real dancing.

I would do a lot of splits and sliding, and it's mating season for the Oyster Girl, and she sees the pearl and this let her know that it is mating season.

And then at the end, I get a huge net and I flip it over on the floor and I scream and I roll myself in the net.

It was very unique.

It lasted about 8 minutes.

In 1949, Evangeline the Oyster Girl, graced the pages of Life magazine thanks to the manager of the club.

She was working in his said Kitty he said, I have a friend at Life magazine.

They're interested in you and they want to take pictures for Life magazine.

He said, But we've got to make this look real.

I said, Don't worry, I will.

So he said, I'm going to do some, I'm going to put Davina's building.

I had a view and order to get you angry.

So he did that.

Davina was in a water tank I'm not sure of how much water, but it was enough for her to turn flips then and do a few acrobats and she would strip and the water in this huge tank.

And at this particular time, when I got angry, he had put in a fire ax there that day.

So I grabbed the fire ax.

Then I ran on stage and I broke the water tank and they were snapping away and the whole club was flooded, people screaming and here comes the police.

And they says, Kitty, we've got to do this.

I said, What?

He said, We have to take you to jail.

They took me to jail, but they only put me in front of the bars and find me $10 a quarter.

It's in long time New Orleans broadcast personalities.

Bob and Jan Carr raised their four children on Bourbon Street.

We put them in a little red wagon.

We play a little game.

Jan thought it was nice.

I didn't know if it was very good.

Her grandmother came.

This is what she thought.

It was outrageous that I would say, which one of you kids sees the most strippers as we go by, gets the most business where we get to think a lot.

Margie O'Dwyer spent part of her childhood on Bourbon Street, where her parents had a restaurant you had a Chinese family by the name of Jee down the block.

You had them a triangle Italian restaurant down another block there, lots of families, and it was a different picture and I enjoyed it so much as a child.

Probably other people would come from uptown and not think so.

We did have New Year's Eve.

Some people that would venture forward in tuxedos in the quarter and look at these strange little children down here on Bourbon Street.

Even then, it had a strange feeling of verboten.

Yeah, but.

But not for us.

This street had long been home to music clubs, which at one point presented vaudeville acts.

The late Dave Weinstein, longtime Musicians Union president, played on Bourbon Street in the early thirties.

The strip wasn't as long as it is today.

It actually only ran about two blocks or three blocks small but up significant size.

When it came to jobs.

That would be anywhere from 100 to 150 musicians working on Bourbon Street at any one given time.

There were so many places, and Bourbon Street also was populated mostly by local people.

But when the war came along, it changed everything because when the troops got in the place toughened up, they were using the troops as moneymaking.

Deals.

They didn't want any local people who ever had the local people.

They spent just the minimum.

And that's that's when the whole of Bourbon Street changed and the audience soon became a mix of locals and tourists who enjoyed listening to music Pete Fountain had two clubs on Bourbon, and during the late 1940s, and in the 1950s played at numerous nightspots.

Now, Morocco, that's where I met my wife Emily, how her mother and dad brought it to hear me play and I saw her.

She was in a beautiful white dress and I was it from then on, you know, like the week we caught it for about a year and then we'd been married.

They married 48 years.

She put up with my foolishness.

I don't know how.

Sometimes the view from the bandstand could be an awkward one.

I played about one tune and then everybody started laughing, and then the waitress brought up a note and said, Jeannie, on your view, if your pants are over now, your fly's open to New Orleans rhythm and blues singer Clarence Frogman Henry got his start on Bourbon Street practically by accident in 1959.

I was looking for a job and I walked down Bourbon Street with a guy called Cat Man and his and Frank courageously would stand in front of the 500 club barking.

And I said, Do you know you need a one in the Tanna?

And he said, No, I don't need any, so get me to him.

This frog man, Ziegfeld man.

He remembered me from the British Rail, and he said, Well, I'm going to give you a job.

Henry performed at the 500 club La Strada in many other places on the street for almost 30 years.

People would come from out of the country, out of town, and they would, when they come back, they come in, greet you and see about you.

That's what I like about Bourbon Street and didn't have no home world, you know, we had no fights, and it wasn't too many youngsters, you know, it was the money people.

And one thing I like about Bourbon Street, then, like you went to the 500 club with Pat O'Brien Glass and you just leave it there.

You go to the Opera House or the Quarter Two Sisters and the big glass.

And on the end of the week, the club will the different clubs, the glass, the back of the owner hit the own style of glass.

As you know, everybody knew everybody by name.

Everything was connected.

New Orleans pianist James Booker got Doctor John one of his favorite engagements on Bourbon Street.

Well, I was young and dumb in those days, you know, and we used to work 12 hours a night, 365 days a year.

And I say one thing my chops was when we did, they gave me Booker made good money.

And that was probably the best paying gig I ever had in the city.

In New Orleans, there are other memories of Bourbon Street that show how the street lived up to its wild reputation.

There was a practice in those days, too.

Sometimes of giving people Mickeys and a mickey is a drink that will knock you out.

This particular night, this guy got a mickey.

So anyway, we finished the night and I went home and we come back in and we're playing Vegas, New Year's Eve night out, and one of the strippers comes out and she said, Jesus, you know, the dead guy is still in the dressing room.

What?

He said, Yeah, the dead guy is still in the dressing room.

I said, My goodness, I didn't know he was dead, so.

Oh, yeah, he died last night.

So we had to play that whole night knowing which was about a six or seven hour job.

Knowing that this man's body was in the back, in the dressing room, and the strippers were dressing in some other area.

And because they weren't going to notify the police until all that good business had come in and gone during the sixties, and early seventies sax player Al Barletta worked at the Playboy Club, a Playboy bunny.

He had to have a small waist and then go through some of them six weeks training just to become buddies.

And that had to do with how to speak properly, how to bend over without being vulgar.

And then, of course, everybody thought they all had big breasts, but it was basically the costume We had an Easter egg hunt and we started well, I wanted more than just rabbits.

We had some sponsors on our television show at the time.

Bunny Bread.

So the bunny bread had public relations people all dressed in little pink outfits with pink rabbit ears and stuff, and they said they would come to Terri's patio and they would dance with the kids and playing musical games and that sort of thing.

And so the Playboy Club was going hot and heavy at that time down on Iberville Street with Al Barletta and his orchestra and the whole group.

And so I called the Playboy Club and said, Is there any possibility that we could get any play girls to come to our patio and sort of oversee the children?

The big disappointment was they didn't come in their Playboy bunny outfits with the little skirts and bunny tails.

They came in what they call their public relations outfit, which was a nice t shirt and little shorts bunny on the front and and a little short skirt, but no bunny tails.

But they were very nice to the kids.

I mean, they were yeah, they're nice girls.

And they enjoyed holding the the children that they love.

And the guys enjoyed holding the bunnies and know the guys didn't know A popular Bourbon Street nightspot in the fifties and sixties was Dixie's bar of music owned by two sisters, Dixie and Irma.

Now we've got some of the gay crowd, and it was a mixed sort of clientele.

We had the cufflink set, let's put it that way.

Having been a member of an all girl band earlier in her life, Miss Dixie often performed at her club.

She was playing clarinet up on top of the bar, and her sister, Miss Irma, I think, was running the cash register.

One of the most memorable aspects of the decor in Dixie Bar Music was a mural by artist Xavier Gonzales that now hangs in the Louisiana State Museum.

It features sketches of locals and celebrities who visited the bar including a famous music conductor.

The center is is Toscanini, and he's looking down at Louis Prima.

You remember it.

And he's, you know, he's he's flabbergasted.

I mean, that's the expression he kind of has on and I think Gonzalez Mr. Gonzalez, the on purpose, you know, Miss Dixie remembers the evening a friend brought in an American theater legend They brought Helen Hayes in.

And our thoughts are still they just was absolutely wonderful.

You know, I was thrilled.

It was real.

One of the thrills of my life, the have.

And I asked to autograph the mural and shoot it.

Even though Bourbon Street had its share of bars in the early fifties, obtaining a liquor license in the seventh block, then mostly residential, proved to be a challenge.

I told myself to I'm really getting going from person to person, property owner and property owner.

We got the license and we and they all submit.

And I walked in the bar.

They start serving whiskey.

They will serve it already.

I'm selling it and I all I've good friends of, you know, we had we had a wonderful round and I got drunk as a coat Well, I think I was deserving of it.

Whatever nightspot you visited an evening in the quarter often ended with a classic New Orleans ritual coffee and beanies at morning call.

You know, we're like nice mirrors.

You can look in and see just how much you had been drinking because you usually went there after a night of drinking and you needed some grease to go home.

I always assassinate I guess during the season you could, like, run into people who were, you know, coming from carnival balls and things.

I mean, you'd often like going there and you know, there'd be somebody in a in a fur coat or a tuxedo or something, you know, with all that donut powder around the morning call had curb service and you could park your car and the attendants would come out and put a tray, snap it on your car and serve you coffee.

Whenever you went to morning call, you had $0.15 a nickel for the donuts, a nickel for the coffee and the nickel for the tip a visit to morning call could often be a family affair.

But night, you know, you'd throw the kids in pajamas or something today.

You know, it wasn't a school night or some and somebody got restless or something and go, Well, let's go to the French market.

I used to enjoy the regular family debates going back to Cafe Time on between which one was better Morning Call or CAFE Demand.

A cafe demand.

They put the shiver on it, you know, before a candy in the morning cough, you just put all the sugar in one and on it, you know, in the millions.

Morning Carl moved to the suburbs Metairie in 1974 its original location had been at the edge of the French Quarter in the French market.

But by the early 1900s there was very little that was French about the people who worked there and lived nearby at the end of the 19th century Italians fleeing harsh conditions and looking for opportunities streamed into the port of New Orleans.

Many of them settled near the French market.

Originally from the Italian island of Sicily, they had been farmers or sold produce, continuing their line of work in their adopted country.

Italian vendors selling from carts or from fruit and vegetable stands at the market soon became a common sight.

Cosmo Mutasa who produced and was the recording engineer for many classic New Orleans rhythm and blues songs, grew up in the quarter.

One guy used to sell one version of what people today call pizza.

It's a little different.

It's constant journey.

And he would say how what he called it, which is the Sicilian kind of concoction, meaning hot or cold or hot, you know.

So that was the idea.

He kept them hot.

And then this little cart, you know, and his call was hot, you know, everywhere you went.

And there was there was Italians and it's just everywhere.

And you like when you passing by your house, you smell, you know, it smell cooking.

And a guy that would play ball on a Sunday everybody had a white t shirt on playing ball, had gravy stains on a shirt.

You know, everybody was a dad.

It was like Little Italy.

Mickey Ricardo recalls her grandmother, Michel Lena Ricardo, who prefer to speak her native language.

She would try to teach me to count, you know, in Italian.

And when I would forget some of the numbers, she tells me, she says, you know, you remember the bad words, but you don't remember the numbers.

They had a lot of Italian families at that time.

Quite a few, I would say.

75% of my friends in the quarter were Italians.

The lovely old Italian ladies and black shawls, usually black clothes and there were several grocery stores from the late 1800s all the way to the early 1960s.

A popular French Quarter business was salaries a combination delicatessen and grocery.

They appeared of all displays of all the vegetables and fruits and all the meat.

It was just like going through a museum you know, the big barrels of olives, I mean, barrels that you couldn't even put your arms around.

So everyone would walk through on a way from oil to either or to take an olive, you know, the big, big, big olive.

Everyone would do that.

And they didn't care.

I mean, they wanted to, to outside.

So to me that was that's the place I miss the most.

And of course there was Ricardo's Angela Ricardo was from Palermo, Sicily.

And in the early 1900s got his start in America working in the sugar cane fields outside New Orleans.

A few years later he opened an ice cream parlor still in business in the Mid-City neighborhood its original location was on Ursuline Street in the heart of the burgeoning Italian community.

Everything Picado made was from scratch, but most of it was him work and working hard.

I mean, pound and palmas and the marble bowl and mallet and the rose would handle and he had massive almonds and pulverize him into every game of pace.

And to make the flavors in the ice cream man.

Yeah, Tarantino and the Al Kino ice cream, which he used to make, and we no longer made that, but that was an aluminum flavored ice cream.

Well, ricotta is back then was a real dilatory a an Italian ice cream shop.

It it had homemade Italian ices today you can get all kinds.

Back then there was just lemon.

Lemon ice was a favorite of French Quarter restaurant owner Diamond Jim Moran not for dessert, but for breakfast would get an early silver pitcher.

We kept at home.

We walked down the street to Ricardo's and your grandfather, Ricardo would he'd be making it.

We'd wait for him to make it.

And then Philip picked you out.

That would go home.

We get a loaf of French bread and put it in the oven and heat it and bring it up to his bedroom.

The reason Moran was called Diamond Jim wasn't merely because of his sparkling personality.

The first money he made, he bought a little Chip Diamond he loved diamonds.

Its wardrobe was about 150 suits.

He wore mink ties with diamonds, started selling them.

We wore ermine and make hats damn it.

Shoelaces, diamond chip.

A diamond rings diamond buttons with his name spelled out.

He wore about I guess a couple of hundred thousand dollars of damage.

Diamond Jim Moran's actual last name was Picciotto.

Once a prizefighter, he changed his name when he figured the odds of getting better fights would improve if fight promoters thought he was Irish rather than Italian.

He brought up the French Quarter, which was a rough neighborhood and you had to fight to survive.

Moran's restaurant was best known for the possibility that a patron just might find something extra in their meatball.

He used to keep me in charge of a diamond ring.

She would keep a ten, 12, 14 diamond ring, and whenever he shot somebody, he thought might get a kick out of it.

He put one of the rings in a meatball shoe.

Every time I see a nice-Looking little gal, I'd give her a diamond ring.

It made me very, very popular here in the quarter.

The majority of New Orleans is Sicilian.

Community is Catholic.

The hub of the community's social activity was St Mary's Italian Church in the French Quarter.

You go to say, you go to the gym, you play ball.

I just play games with different, you know, different people are box.

Oh, they would have bingo as it was.

It was a community center, which all the Italian people in a neighborhood like this is used to.

They donate to have the thing erected.

It's really a good place for the kids to go to.

I went to Cathedral.

There's a rivalry between Cathedral and Saint Mary's.

But, you know, I was right in between them at the ice cream parlor.

So I knew people from both places.

But it was all, like I said, it was always rivalry between us.

The Pride Jacksonville Project and The Saint Mary's and McDonald.

15.

There's always some kind of rivalry with play ball or see while and different things.

It always you know oh we better than you are no better now Angelo Ricardo was an altar boy at Saint Louis Cathedral.

It was one priest that I used to know to leave a little extra wine and the cruet that when we brought it back behind the altar we've been snorting our religious tradition brought over from Sicily is the celebration of St Joseph's Day on March 19th and thanks for favors granted the faithful erect altars laden with Lenten dishes and pastries in their homes in your day.

And if you go in the kitchen, they give you a plate of macaroni and cheese, artichokes, there's anything you wanted to eat and that they had on the altar.

And then you go from there and run to the next one.

Sometimes it'd be two or three and a block and someone who honored Saint Joseph year round owned a delicatessen on Saint Philip Street Month Banner was his name and he was overtly, extremely religious and the place oozed with religious icons and, and things like that.

Pictures of saints and, and crucifixes and decorations that were really Italian kinds and not very flowery.

And, you know, overdone kind of thing.

But yeah, he was very serious about it.

You know, it was one gang and a hair for holy pictures from the bottom of the floor to the top of the seal and all the way across to the all dole place was papered in all the pages.

One of the standing jokes when people would drink and I would say, let's go down and model banners and blow out one of the candles.

That was our idea of fun.

And that was day since 1906 Central Grocery on Decatur Street has been very much a part of the quarter's culinary history.

The owners claim to be the creators of a real local favorite, the muff, a lot of sandwich Sicilian people eat stuff separately to cold cuts.

They'd sit down, break bread, they'd have their cold cuts, salami cheeses and the olive salad all separate.

They need a little like eating in there to pass a little out of time.

America was a sandwich place in the world.

They used to sell the breads and in the market pot they'd have venders and courts that actually peddled just the bread muscle out.

And that's the main.

They started just putting it all together hey, let's put it all in the bread layer with olive salad.

And now we got a sandwich and it just took off.

And that's how the sandwich started at Martha Banos.

Their own version of the Muffaletta was called the Roma Sandwich.

The whole recording studio being at Cosmo's, we could all come in and get one Muffaletta sandwich, and they were big back there and cut them up in like a piece.

They were like a pizza pie side, but there was way more kind of meat in it.

Put in a muffaletta, this is way more kind of cheese.

And she put she not only put olive oil on one side, she turned the other side over and she put those little one of those little green things around things in an olive salad on the other side.

That she made it.

It was so killer Businesses such as Central Grocery and Marta Banos were just blocks away from where most Italian immigrants first got their start.

The French market Since the early 1900s, members of the Fushi family have been arriving at the market very early in the morning to sell their produce.

Well, we start about two in the morning, and between 1958, 1968 went on until six in the evening.

I would sit at the typewriter and bang away and at three in the morning if I wanted coffee, I would just fork over the French market which was open all night and the fish market would be open all night too.

So I'd buy shrimp or whatever.

$0.27 worth of shrimp and two in the morning, three in the morning, though most of the farmers and producers were of Italian descent.

Not everyone was.

When I was a kid, my grandfather, my uncle and my grandmother, they sold the vegetable in the French market.

And I would kick your right 3:00 in the morning on a truck.

Down in the French market to go sell my grandmother snapping and pole being, you know.

The French market was a place where you could get just about anything edible shrimp live chickens, live turkeys, you could go buy a lot of chicken, live turkeys, you know, the ring their necks right in front of you and clean them and then say we go up in the fish market.

That was all the water, the stinking water running out of both of the the fish stalls.

And there was a a like a a gutter down the middle.

Stinky, I guess.

But, you know, we were used to stinky in those days.

We didn't we didn't worry about Stinky and and Grandma would go and she'd shop here on this side and then she'd shop on that side and make some selection.

And you just really had a cut open carve for you.

You know, you you said that's the one they got.

They started cutting it.

And we lived close enough to the French market on the main street that every Friday the children were got on the front gallery and go, it's Friday.

This is Pew Day because you can smell the fish laughing its fragrance down to Main Street and they wouldn't go out and play on the on the gallery on Fridays.

One of the major fish vendors was the Bat Estella family about a stallion was kind of famous guys who told their wives they were going fishing but really weren't going fishing.

They're stopping by to star in like buy fish and, you know, and ask somebody and say, where did you catch those Lake Batista just a few feet from the French market, trains transported goods from the warehouses on the docks of the Mississippi River where my grandfather was, Cicero.

He worked on the river front.

He was up and down and he saw me one day, me, a couple of friends of mine jumping on the box cars and riding them from Jackson Brewery to Esplanade and going back.

And I saw him and he spotted me.

I ran home about 30 minutes later, he shows up at the house and without saying a word, he just took off his straw hat and started beating me with a straw hat.

And I said, What's not listening is you tell him what I was doing.

I got it from Hollywood.

The bell whether it's the rich immigrant tapestry of the French market or the funkiness of Bourbon Street, the French Quarter has always been defined by the people who inhabit it, people you just won't find anywhere else.

In the heart of the French Quarter is Jackson Square.

Overlooking it is historic.

Saint Louis Cathedral when we were in high school, we'd end up in front of Jackson Square between the cathedral and Jackson Square.

And we made like the temptations or The Stylistics or anybody else who had a song that we knew.

It sounded halfway decent singing.

You know, we'd be on the bench and we'd try to harmonize and somebody would be the bass and somebody be the tenor and somebody would be the soprano.

And we sing a song like a runaway child running while doing fine on Cloud nine and those kinds of things.

You know, you make any money?

Oh, no, no, no, no.

This is late at night after a couple of pictures of beer and just looking for something to do, you know?

No, it wasn't the tips.

And frankly, I don't think anybody ever throw anything away either.

But you know why that spot?

Well, I think it probably was the echoes.

You know, you can when you don't have a voice, you can sing and it sounds better like singing in the shower.

It was usually pretty late and empty, too.

Jackson Square is flanked by the Pinetop Apartments.

Over 150 years old Andres Calandrea and his family lived in the Bean Thomas in the 1940s and early fifties.

I would run downstairs and and the park and that was my playground and it was a wonderful experience because it was made up of children and you had really three things in the park.

You had old man reading then newspapers.

You had women coming out of the church singing their rosaries, and then you had women, mothers watching their children at play.

Being entertained by what you see on the street has always been part of the French Quarter experience.

When I was a little boy, you used to see on many corners of the French Quarter organ grinders who were Italian, I believe, and they were dressed in cute little hats, well dressed.

The monkeys were very well dressed.

They had little hats.

They would tip their hats to you and they would come up to you with a little cup and ask you for money.

And they were just a beautiful sight to see.

For quarter residents, time seemed to standstill at spots such as the Bourbon House, located at Bourbon and Saint Peter's Streets.

It was a haven for some unforgettable personalities, the verve and how it was probably the institution in the whole French Quarter.

Everyone that lived in a quarter hung out there.

The people that actually lived in the quarter hung out there in the morning and late at night.

It was a neighborhood place.

You can walk in there and you say Hey, how are you doing, Sam?

Hi.

You know, and they were just neighborhood people.

I was telling someone just the other day that there will never be another Bourbon House because you could get a cup of coffee in the morning and sit there at the table all day long until midnight with that one cup of coffee.

Had a lot of runs on all the places that you are right now.

You can't you can't do that.

Restaurant owner Joanne Clevenger lived in the French Quarter from the late fifties into the sixties and was a regular at the Bourbon House many of the people who were artists in my life, I met there at the Bourbon House, and there was this other whole aura of people on the phone placing bets for the racetrack, and it was a place full of wonderful characters.

One of the things about a place like the Bourbon House or the French Quarter is that there are many different kinds of people and ages and income levels, and yet there's an intense sense of community the Bourbon House had its own special cast of characters.

Mr. Jimmy, the Legless Man who sold papers down on the corner on Bourbon, on Royal Street, in front of the A&P.

He would go there every evening and he always have some sort of quaint, cute remark like, Where have you been?

And I say, Oh, I was out buying socks, you know, pretty cute.

Joke.

But Mr. Jimmy would come in there every day several times.

Probably a frequent patron at the Bourbon House was art gallery owner Larry Borenstein.

Larry was a guru.

He was a wise man in the best sense of that.

He was also a business man.

And I think that because he was such a practical person, yet he was attracted to the arts, music, poetry, artists, paintings of pre-Colombian artifacts from Mexico.

He was a a person who attracted other people to him, creative people.

And he could find ways to help them make a living by showing their work or saying, if you do this a little bit differently, I think they'll sell he was one of the success stories kind of horror.

But I still basically he was just a plain old t shirt and just plain old pants and sandals.

And he wore and he was a rich bohemian.

I think New Orleans owes a great deal to Larry Born Sheen.

He was a character and sometimes he wasn't very pleasant, but he had a lot of foresight, a lot of guts, a lot of imagination.

And he knew how to get things done.

And you did?

Yeah.

He was a great character.

Larry loved to have special events.

He would have a poetry reading on Sunday afternoon with Ken Flex, Ralph or Allen Ginsberg, and he would round up some old jazz musicians to play at these poetry readings.

And one time he was gone for a long time in Mexico, and three people started having the musicians come in on a more regular basis and pass the hat to pay for them.

So Bill Russell, Dick Allen, and Parbery started doing this on a regular basis, and it worked and Larry came back from Mexico, and he was so excited and a little dismayed, I think, because he didn't know exactly what's going on.

Larry always like to know what's going on.

But here it was, the musicians were playing every night, and the the people who had made this work were sitting at the door with a basket collecting money from the public who were coming into here.

Preservation Hall, musicians.

What's it called?

Preservation Hall then?

I can't remember when the name get started.

But about four months later, Larry goes off again and we had no idea where it was.

And he comes back with his very talented young business man and musician named Alan Jaffe, and he puts Jaffe in charge of Preservation Hall, which some of us didn't like.

And others said, Oh, good, this means it will continue and Jaffe had a real passion for the whole thing and made it work.

The late Alan Jaffe conveyed this passion in an NBC documentary from the early sixties.

The program focused on the status of New Orleans jazz.

The people were sitting on wooden benches, sitting on the floor.

There's no drink pretty hot in there to the summer.

People come to hear him, just the music.

But I think the man realizes that the men play it the way they want to play it.

People hear it.

But one artist who was very much a part of Bernstein's world was Noel Rockmore only by destruction.

As Picasso said so correctly in 1937 to questions of was do you create only by destroying art as not decoration art as war a passionate, tormented artist, passionate about the quarter, passionate about the eternities of life, over the years, he documented many of the characters in the courtroom.

He drank too much and was very angry at himself.

For it, for drinking.

He was always around and usually grouchy.

Let's see, it just happened to catch him in a he fuzes mode.

And I think that was one of the things that why he was attracted to bars, because he loved to talk and he would have when he was in the right mood, he could be quite an intellectual, as Suzanne said about Monet.

I'm an only and I but what not.

I Another artist supported by Larry Bernstein was Sister Gertrude Morgan.

Sister Gertrude was a missionary lady, and she used to stand in the corner of St Peter and Royal, and some mornings she would be by herself, especially on Sunday mornings.

So she would sometimes have other people there with musical instruments.

And she had a tambourine, she would say, and she would speech her messages from God.

She believed that God had a mission for her to preach to others and to bring His Word to them.

In the little pictures she made, she made little small pictures, paintings on pieces, of paper.

She felt that God only wanted her to give his words and his pictures away to others.

She painted on anything, anything she could find anywhere on the street when she didn't have canvasses and tracing paper and things like that.

Artists have, but now they've become very collectible, and people pay lots of money for those little pictures that's just to get you to give away.

And they're hanging museums.

And so it's quite wonderful because her missionary works now go out to many people, even though she is no longer with us very much in the inner circle of Larry Bernstein's friends was the late Mike Stark.

He was a man who came to New Orleans to go to the Baptist Seminary and became a Baptist minister, but then got involved with the life of the quarter.

I got involved with Preservation Hall and Larry Bornstein and that group of people Larry thought it was great fun to own his own Baptist preacher.

And so I got to work with Larry.

I was a sitter at his gallery and so I got to meet with all the art community and just lucked out he was a I think if I had to say it one word as a humanitarian, he reached out to other people and yet made things happen, whether it was Dark Realities or Head Clinic working for me and my mask shop making my Mardi Gras shop, making wonderful masks and opening his own shop but always being there when somebody got married or somebody died, they would he would be to give the services and to be a person that could find practical answers to problems.

And that combination of being very smart and a problem solver and spiritual and loving was a wonderful influence on many, many people in the quarter.

But often it's the quarter that does the influencing.

Playwright Tennessee Williams, his long love affair with New Orleans began in the late 1930s.

He came down from Saint Louis, Missouri, with hopes of getting a job with the Louisiana Writers Project.

That was part of the Works Progress Administration the job never materialized in a 1981 interview.

Williams reminisced about his early days in New Orleans the setting for many of his plays I was living in various rooming houses and you know I had no money and had to hock everything.

I remember one time I had a bar right you the early years William spent in New Orleans where years of personal discovery where I had been around the good proper sort of person, you know, in my private life.

The end of the decade.

And with all these then I discovered that in flexibility in my sexual ventures I felt like a migratory bird getting to witness to a more congenial climate I just felt I would like it down In 1946, Tennessee Williams lived in a third floor apartment at 630 to St Peter's Street.

It is there at a table under a skylight that he completed a play called The Poker Night.

Out of his window he could see a streetcar that ran on Royal Street That Rattletrap streetcar, he called it.

He decided to rename his play after that Streetcar Named Desire.

He was a person who came in the Bourbon House and sat there sometimes with just a Brandy Alexander playing the jukebox and sometimes had something to eat.

And he was one of the parties around the corner.

But the more exciting part was he was a successful artist, playwright.

He had come well-known and successful in the creative endeavors he set out to do.

And there were others like that.

But he was the most well known.

And what I think that did was send us all a message.

Yes, you can succeed at what you set out to do.

French Quarter personalities can have a unique way of making their presence known.

We had a man called the Glass Shooter He would come in, my mother and father at a restaurant on Bourbon Street when I was about eight years old.

And he would come in the restaurant.

And if he needed a drink, he would ask somebody for a dollar or so and he would eat glass and show you how I wouldn't tear up his mouth.

Another French Quarter character made his presence noticed in a more serpentine manner.

My favorite memory is of Chicken Man And when he used to go in into bus to homes and busses would be packed and he wanted to eat and get out in a hurry.

He'd take this African brim off his head and lay it on the counter.

And he had this big black snake in it, and it kind of went empty and busted, get his food and put his hand back on and leave.

That is, to me, New Orleans.

Playing for tips in Bourbon Street nightclubs and on the street were true quarter fixtures known as pork chop and kidneys, too.

They are shown here, performing with New Orleans bandleader and trumpeter Sharkey banana.

Well, there was just two real good dances.

I mean, it was really great dances that could come out of different bags and hustle.

There wasn't you regulation street dances.

Day was like more of a class act kind of dance.

But they could get ready if that's what they needed to do to make a hustle.

And it's and you play the bones and the spoons for them to dance and used to sing that song.

I Used to Love is a Good Blues.

By the Gay Pride Kansas City I'll Make It To Texas on my own.

A long time French Quarter character who is still with us is named Ruthie.

She's immediately identified with the kind of pet that she's had over the years.

Maybe, you know, and it was funny because she used to walk on Bourbon Street and that was just like a little dog the little puppies.

They would finally do anything you want them to do.

Now you see a long Rollerskates would end up going to the quarters with a little evening dress But I heard the story of my dad when when the duck got hit by the car, everybody was scared to tell.

She went, There's still a left to duck.

And she walked on in the middle of the street and said, I told you, don't call us.

So the light changes.

One Our friends were coming over for cocktails.

And it just so happened they ran into Ruthie, the duck girl right outside of our gate, and they decided to invite her in for cocktails.

I mean, we knew her, but we thought, gosh, here she is all of a sudden.

And that's when she was having her duck with her.

So she came in and that my parents and the people from Ohio were flabbergasted and they couldn't believe it.

This was a real person to us.

And she was wearing her her evening gown and sometimes roller skates.

But that notion that roller skates on.

But she had the duck with her.

So she came in and we were having Sazerac and I believe and I said, Ruthie, would you like a Sazerac?

No, no, no.

I want a Cigaret and I want a beer from a duck.

And then the beer.

So we brought in a beer for the duck, and the duck immediately soiled the carpet.

So and our friends from out of town were just never flabbergasted.

This is Bourbon Street.

This is New Orleans.

Now, I know why Bob and John like living here.

More somber recollections are of a woman named Louisa Lopez.

Who literally carried across the little Spanish lady with a cross who dragged a little wagon behind her that had a little crucifix or a little Jesus in it, wrapped in the winter in a little white dirty blanket.

And in the summer, she had a little we'll call it a towel, some kind of little towel.

Like to take Jesus to the beach.

I presume it was Jesus in there.

I didn't I didn't investigate.

She used to go to the cathedral and she would crawl from the backside all the way up to the front.

And the archbishop heard that so many times that he somehow I don't know how it's done, but he requested that she walked instead of crawled up the altar like that.

I mean, that was just too much supplication, right?

George Darrow recalls the story Mike Stark told him shortly after Mrs. Lopez died He said, Well, I ran into Ruthie today.

And I said, You did?

And he said, And Ruthie stopped me.

And she said, Mike, let me tell you something.

And I said, What is that, Ruthie?

And she said, The old lady died today.

And I said, Oh, isn't that something?

And she said, There aren't many of us left like that.

Do you love that enough?

There are.

And many of us laughed Tennessee Williams considered New Orleans with its French Quarter, the last frontier of Bohemia, and there aren't many places like the quarter left anywhere.

The balance between neighborhood and tourist attraction continues to be a delicate one.

The Streetcar Named Desire disappeared shortly after Williams completed his play.

And today, a streetcar with its clatter might not be as welcome as it once was.

And the most plentiful immigrants these days are pesky ones from Formosa.

But whatever challenges that lie ahead for the corner, the neighborhood will likely face them with the same resolute charm that has allowed it to flourish for almost 300 years.

♪ The French Quarter that was is made possible by the WYES Producers Circle, a group of generous contributors dedicated to the support of Channel 12 local productions and corporate funding is provided by Whitney Bank.

Dreams.

Dreams keep us going.

Dreams keep us growing.

Dreams keep us thriving.

Hancock Whitney.

Your dream.

Our mission.